Cimorene

I've been laughing about a post I've seen on Tumblr about Our Flag Means Death: besides everybody plotzing over how much they're enjoying it of course, there's also obviously stratospheric amounts of shipping, and a post from a Kiwi going round that I've seen a few times that says something like, 'I hope you, the World, know how traumatic it is for us in New Zealand that people are thirsting for Rhys Darby. It's like if the whole world saw your dad's penis.'

Wax and I were chuckling about this because Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby are also very old friends, of similar age, who are both Kiwis and are actually both dads, but obviously Taika doesn't have Dad Energy at all. And Rhys Darby, I guess, is nothing but Dad Energy. (I've only seen him before in the Jumanji movies, not being fully up on Kiwi comedy, but apparently Wax knew who he was.) And obviously nobody in New Zealand can be upset about people thirsting over Taika, or if they were, they would surely be used to it by now.

This reminded me of discussion after Good Omens (TV) aired a bit - here's the post I made then about Michael Sheen being fandom's new boyfriend (unexpectedly) and that viral tumblr post about how someone expected everyone to thirst for David Tennant and instead fandom was like 'michael sheen raw me'. But nobody in Britain or Wales was saying they would be traumatized by people thirsting over Michael Sheen, that I heard; that would have been silly. Well, partly because he's had memorable roles since he was a twink and has doubtlessly been thirsted over plenty of times before, but also because he's such a chameleon as an actor that his roles are frequently unrecognizable from each other. In other words, when Michael Sheen is being himself he has INCREDIBLY Dad Energy, just... off the charts, and adorably so, unlike David Tennant, who is about the same age and also has like five kids?? to Sheen's two. But Aziraphale doesn't have Dad Energy, nor do many of his other characters. (They tend to all have different energy.)

Whereas Rhys Darby, according to Wax, is the kind of comedian who always plays himself more or less (a fully valid and not at all inferior way of being a comedian!), and he has the same Dad Energy in real life and in his roles. Also because of this, no doubt, people feel they've grown up with him and he's a bit more like their dad.

Wax had an added dimension to add because her dad was a quintessential Hot Dad. He was a charismatic guy everyone was friends with, an extrovert I guess, and he had an unfortunate habit of hanging around outside their farm shirtless and no doubt in short-short cutoff shorts and wooden clogs (it was the 80s and early 90s after all). Her friends thirsted and it was horrible. My dad also did stuff in the yard shirtless in cutoff jeans, but he was a cute cuddly little nebbishy bear: buddha belly, covered in brown fur, wild "Mountain Man" beard (as my mom called it). People who weren't even my friends - people I had no reason to suppose knew where I lived - would ask me at school if that was my dad they saw outside my house dressed like this and chuckle.

I wasn't consumed with embarrassment though, because this is standard for yardwork unless you're a WASP or something. Or possibly because I was a weird kid and couldn't imagine being embarrassed by my dad? In any other context, my dad was that dad that every other kid was jealous of. The INCREDIBLY cool dad. He used to come to school to eat lunch with me every couple of weeks when I was 8-10 and there would be legit scuffles among my classmates to sit on the other side of him and get his attention. Everybody's favorite uncle. He still is btw.

But this means he has a lot more Kooky Uncle energy than Dad Energy, I guess? Like, he very much IS a dad, but as a cerebral, nerdy, formerly twinky jew, I guess he was always so much of an oddball that his personality and his masculinity are just WAY too far from stereotypical American masculinities for him to ever fit a typical template. (The stereotypical Dad template in America is very much informed by middle-class WASP background and by a certain degree of repression etc caused by the wounds of toxic masculinity, and that stuff mostly has missed my dad for the aforementioned demographic reasons.) Anyway, nobody was thirsting after him to my knowledge, although I'm sure if he were a character on tv they would (because the only quality necessary for someone to thirst is celebrity, period).

waxjism was getting panic symptoms and oncoming sniffles symptoms so bad at work that she had to leave early and go to the doctor, and now she's got a week of medical leave, prescriptions for depression and anxiety and a referral to a psychologist. I mean hopefully all that helps, so good (the idea that you can just have 2 days off and then be able to continue work as usual after the death of a parent without adverse symptoms seems insane to me), but that's where she was at: physical illness in reaction to being at her place of work.

Meanwhile, in counter-fug combating measures, today I changed the bed, did the backlog of dishes and assembled the recycling, and cleared our desk area, which is... not all the basics of stuff that needs to be done to make this side of the house as functional as possible, but an adequate start. And I not coincidentally avoided drawing for the first time since the beginning of October (and I've been intending to take a day off to rest my hand and wrist since they started feeling the strain about 2 weeks ago), so that represents a feat of will.

I also bookmarked all the fic that I finished and liked from the last month, which enabled me to delete it off my phone. AO3 says that brings me to 210 Good Omens bookmarks.

The glut of Good Omens fic has been slowing down gradually, as I mentioned before, and that's why I've had to cast about for other things to read - I couldn't fill all my counterphobic compulsive reading needs from the pairing tag anymore. To that end, there are a handful of Eddie/Richie bookmarks there as well. That's the It fandom, which is also what Wax has been reading most of the time lately. I've only seen part 1 after Wax assured me that it wasn't a scary movie - I hate jump scares and don't watch or read horror genre, so I've also not read the book; I actually think the fic would be pretty much comprehensible even if I hadn't seen the movie, although the ability to ask Wax wtf something is referring to has occasionally been of use (she's been a King fan since childhood and has all his books - when we met she had multiple copies of most of them, and Swedish translations of quite a few, which she got rid of about 10 years ago when we Marie Kondoed our book collection).

... Anyway, Wax doesn't enjoy talking about things that she's read that much, so she keeps bookmarks or shares links only with great reluctance, and due to the volume of this fandom, I have been surfing around through bookmark lists from essentially randomly chosen AO3 users rather than just sorting and filtering the whole tag. I haven't approached a fandom in this way in years! But I noticed when I did sort and filter the whole tag that it was already large enough that the good stuff didn't seem to be rising to the top few pages of results, and so far this is having a slightly better success rate. Any recs (or, preferably, recs of bookmarkers reading the pairing to check out) would be appreciated.

I've observed a gradual rise in fanfiction in general, and now a rather sharp rise in Good Omens fanfiction in particular, of writers attempting to use "bottom" and even "rear" in a sexy context.

It's a truly sobering reflection that this phenomenon could soon be frequent enough to qualify as a pet peeve, something that wasn't even in my darkest imaginings the first time I had the misfortune to read it so many years ago.

CROWLEY: Sorry. Consecrated ground. It's like being at the beach in bare feet.
FANON FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE EVIDENTLY NEVER BEEN TO THE BEACH: Crowley nearly died... Crowley's feet were burned to blisters for weeks... Crowley still has white scars all over his soles eighty years later.

I've read a direct treatment of this scene and concept that was clever and which I quite liked just now - this one:

Burnt (10069 words) by flamethrower
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale, Crowley, Cassiel, God, OFC, OMC
Additional Tags: GFY, the London Blitz, 1941, Dumpster Fire of Angst, with a happy ending, Non graphic mentions of burn wounds, Crowley is still seriously bitter about the Crucifixion, the Church scene except sideways, Nazis die and all is well, Ineffable Idiots, ineffable husbands, meant to become canon compliant, mostly - Freeform, Shh, Panic, PTSD, the old hurt/comfort tag makes an appearance
Summary:

Crowley has time to prepare for the fact that he's going to have to enter a bloody sanctified church to save an idiot during the Blitz in 1941. It's too bad there isn't really enough prep time in the world to cope with this consecrated ground shit if you're a demon.

- which definitively, knowingly, and explicitly departs from canon in this point, as indicated by the tags.

But the greater portion of the above fanon trope that I've seen are simply sprinkled around in the background of other stories, many of them good, but with no indication that it is a departure from canon (or to put it another way, a very slight AU on this one point only, along the lines of 'Everything the Same Except They Kissed Once' or 'Everything the Same Except He Spells His Name Differently', or to borrow from another fandom, 'Everything the Same Except He Wears Glasses and Has Long Hair in a Ponytail').

Of course, you can wriggle around the canon by assuming that Crowley was lying when he said that, much like any spackle. And an awful lot of people choose to do that, possibly because the angstier and more melodramatic alternative is like catnip.

... But maybe also a little bit because following fanon can be a lot like following a desire path through a field: it's faster and feels comfortable and peer-endorsed and you might not even consciously notice that you've done it; although I think usually these runaway popular bits of fanon are ones that don't come so close to contradicting canon.

So my conclusion is that fanon has carved out a well-worn interpretation of least resistance and that people for the most part aren't noticing any conflict between it and canon.

This conclusion, however, I feel relies on a large portion of the fanon's adherents not having much experience of the beach in bare feet, at least not enough for the memory to leap up in their minds and say "That's not AT ALL what the beach in bare feet is like" every time they read it (not all of them, obviously, and not in the cases like the above rec; more the ones where it slides by unquestioned in the background as a throwaway).

Perhaps they've been on asphalt in bare feet and are (incorrectly) extrapolating.

I honestly cannot believe that here in the year 2019 I can't go a single day without seeing an overly-intense post trying to bring back "who tops" wars.

It really has that 1990s originally-printed-in-a-zine-possibly whiff of International Male catalog to it.

(OTOH you'd think it had been long enough that the nostalgia would just be amusing, but the wounds of this whole Top and Bottom discourse are still too fresh, possibly because it is one of the most tiresome discourses to ever plague a lot of sex scenes.)

itishypatiaofalexandria posted: ineffably-human: feoplepeel: ultraballantine: ...

I wonder if some of the bigger differences in the characterization of Aziraphale and Crowley from the books to the series are due to the shift from a late Cold War era to the current shitshow.

I read this whole post some time ago and probably reblogged it but I didn't save it anywhere at the time. Some on-the-nose observations about the temporal setting and cultural climate of 1990 vs 2019 from several different posters (as well as someone who has forgotten that Gabriel was invented for the tv series but nonetheless makes a good observation about him).

We've reached that magical level of fandom activity where a kudos to hits ratio better than 1:10 is no longer a guarantee of basic (ie proofread) presentability.

I've gone back through all the new Good Omens fic I've bookmarked recently, the Good Omens Renaissance fic if you will, and added either comments or informative tags to the bookmarks as necessary where the author's headers weren't enough to give me a clear picture of which fic it was.

There's still only 70 of them, though, because it's not quite possible yet to keep up with the new supply at the same rate it's appearing. Eventually I will go through my old bookmarks from Pinboard and look for which ones can be found on ao3 in order to add them as well, but for the time being there's no old-school book-fandom-only bookmarks in these.

cimorene - Bookmarks | Archive of Our Own (filtered to Relationship: Aziraphale/Crowley)

This filter is the effective way to view bookmarks only in Good Omens fandom and works because I haven't bookmarked any that don't contain the pairing so far. Otherwise, a custom search would be necessary, because, as I previously complained, "Good Omens (TV)" and "Good Omens - NG & TP" are currently (bizarrely) treated by the archive as two separate fandoms and there's no single parent tag that lets you include both these fandoms at once; and if you ticked both of them in the filters it would only show the ones that are tagged with both, thus excluding all the ones tagged with only one or the other of the two.

ithiliana posted: Good Omens Meta List

She's including meta from all sites here, and welcoming suggestions! Although it sounds like perhaps not ones hosted on Tumblr?... Even ones on Tumblr, which she hasn't found yet because it's a pain to navigate. Tumblr is rather awkward for saving things on anyway though, so I haven't even tried to go back and find the ones I've reblogged and favorited yet, but there's no denying I've read more there than anywhere else in the GO Renaissance Era (albeit much of it not in a traditional meta post format).

stellar_dust posted: Relationship imbalance in Good Omens fic: A Meta

In just about every A/C fic, regardless of whether they’re friends, or in an asexual relationship, or fucking constantly, or married, or spending 60k words trying to work out just what they are, or whatever -- there’s almost always at least a tiny little whiff of imbalance. I don’t quite want to say power imbalance, but maybe status imbalance? To the extent that Aziraphale is nearly always, even just the tiniest barely-there unconscious bit, held higher than Crowley just because he never experienced the Fall. Sometimes it’s explicit in the text, sometimes in one or both of their inner monologues, sometimes only really subtly there in the particular word choices the author uses.

Isn’t part of the point, though, that they both like being who they are, even if both Head Offices are a bit rubbish? That they are in fact balanced? That Hell may have split from Heaven, but that breakup was part of the ineffable plan, and Hellish things don’t automatically have to be corrupt or bad just because God said so? That demons and angels do, after all, have free will, and that Hell tends to corruption only because that’s what most of them have chosen and continue to choose? That Heaven is a little too self-righteous to be automatically and always good, because most angels have chosen pride over humility since the Fall, and continue to do so?

I enjoyed this essay a lot, and there are further good points in the comments!